Summer Reading for the Henry
VIII Unit
This is not an easy article but it provides
an overview of how Henry has been
perceived over time. I have interspersed
the article with questions (in bold) to try to
focus your reading. As you are reading
each section think about the question I
have asked.
In addition I would urge you to read around the subject if
possible. Perhaps some lighter historical fiction which
will at least give you a sense of the period. Try these:
Dark Fire by C. S. Sansom – a thriller about a
hunchback lawyer in Henry’s London. Great for
getting a sense of the period and a great read.
Sovereign/Dissolution/Revelation by CS Sansom –
three other books from the same series.
The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory – a novel
based around Mary and Anne Boleyn.
The Boleyn Inheritance by Philippa Gregory – a
novel based around the events of 1540 when Henry
marries Anne of Cleves but falls in love with
Catherine Howard.
History Today > Archives > History Today Issues > Volume: 56 Issue: 2 > Will the Real Henry VIII Please Stand
Up?
History Today February 2006 | Volume: 56 Issue: 2 | Page 28-36 | Words: 5481 | Author: Ives, Eric
Printable version
Will the Real Henry VIII Please Stand Up?
Henry VIII may be our most famous monarch, a man who still bestrides English history as mightily as he
dominated his kingdom nearly 500 years ago – but how well do we really understand him? Eric Ives looks
for the man behind the bluster.
How and why have views of Henry changed over time?
School children in Mussolini’s Italy were given a cartoon
history book. The page devoted to Henry VIII showed him in
the Tower of London, leaning on the headsman’s axe. In front
was the block and a kneeling wife holding up an infant in
supplication; behind, a queue of other wives waiting their turn.
Henry taking a breather: the basket beside the block is already
full of heads. Italy and much of Europe had long seen Henry
that way. In Donizetti’s opera Anna Bolena (1830), he is a
Machiavellian who bates a trap for Anne by recalling her
former suitor from abroad. He says to the Captain of his
Guard,
It is for you to ensure that the execution of my grand design
does not miscarry. Keep their every step and every word under
constant scrutiny.
English opinion could be equally damning. The young Jane
Austen wrote:
The crimes and cruelties of this prince were too numerous to
be mentioned, and nothing can be said in his vindication but
that his abolishing religious houses and leaving them to the
various depredations of time has been of infinite use to the
landscape of England.
Go even further back to student plays at the Jesuit seminary at St Omer in the early 1600s. One
ended with Henry being dragged down to Hell, in close anticipation of Don Giovanni.
Talking pictures brought this monstrous Henry to life. The archetype is Charles Laughton’s Oscarwinning king in The Private Life of Henry VIII (Alexander Korda 1933). This established the macho,
totally self-regarding, totally self-absorbed Henry, and, incidentally the popular notion that the Tudors
had no table manners. The message of the film is clear. Henry VIII’s reign can be reduced to wife
trouble. The opening announces that Katherine of Aragon will not appear because ‘her story is of no
particular interest – she was a respectable woman so Henry divorced her’, and the film ends with the
king saying of Katherine Parr – more a bossy nurse than subservient wife – ‘Six wives and the best of
them is the worst’. Laughton is a lustful monarch, a cock among a bevy of sweet chicks, each with
eyes on the royal bed; a man who sees women as objects. That, too, is the Henry of Carry On Henry,
the most widely circulated of all later films about the King. Television’s The Six Wives of Henry VIII
(1970) served history better and Keith Michell’s performance was more deeply drawn than
Laughton’s, but as the title made clear, the focus was once again on Henry the married man. In his
Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII (2003) even David Starkey, who knows better, had to succumb
to the expected.
The alternative Henry is the Henry of the Reformation. Indeed, the battle of Protestant versus Roman
Catholic was for many years fought out over his character and motivation. Henry himself established
the Protestant reading. The Great Bible, to which each of his subjects had access by law, has an
engraved frontispiece of Henry enthroned, with God in the margin endorsing him with texts such as ‘I
have found a man after my own heart who shall fulfil all my will’. The opposing Catholic view was put
by Henry’s cousin Cardinal Reginald Pole. He wrote in 1536:
At your age in life and with all your experience of the world, you were enslaved by your passion for a
girl. But she would not give you your will unless you rejected your wife, whose place she longed to
take.
Henry driven by lust was hard for Protestants to counter. Bishop Burnet fell back on an omnipotent
God who uses frail humans to achieve his will. It was a good line, often repeated, but Catholics
undoubtedly held the high moral ground. For good measure, they could also accuse Henry of greed in
destroying the monasteries and so producing massive social distress. That even persuaded the nonCatholic William Cobbett who declared:
The reformation was engendered in beastly lust, brought forth in hypocrisy and perfidy, and cherished
and fed by plunder, devastation, and by rivers of English and Irish blood.
Henry and sex, Henry and religion. The King’s first major biographer, Herbert of Cherbury, argued
that together these explained the posthumous collapse of Henry’s reputation.
It may truly be said, all his pomp died with him; his memory being now expos’d to ...obloquy... either
by discontented clergymen (for his relinquishing of papal authority, and overthrowing the monasteries)
or offended women (for divers severe examples against their sex).
More nuanced and secular interpretations only begin to appear in the mid-nineteenth century. James
Anthony Froude presented Henry as a statesman who had led England out of medieval bigotry to
moderation, saved it from invasion and religious war, and the British constitution was in large
measure built ‘on foundations laid in his reign’. Henry’s faults were great but forgivable in ‘a sovereign
who in trying times sustained nobly the honour of the English name and carried the commonwealth
securely through the hardest crisis in its history’. A.F. Pollard dismissed Anne Boleyn in a sentence:
‘her place in English history is due solely to the circumstance that she appealed to the less refined
part of Henry’s nature’. His monumental biography of the King claimed a deep symbiotic relationship
between the monarch and the people of England and an astute, perhaps instinctive, identification with
the contemporary zeitgeist. That in making omelettes Henry smashed a large number of valuable
eggs was beside the point; the alternative was civil strife and bloodshed on a huge scale.
Since Pollard’s death in 1948 historical knowledge has been
revolutionized by research on a scale he could not have imagined.
And not simply scale. From the late fifteenth century, source
material for English history begins to expand in both quantity and
subject matter. Froude and Pollard were pioneers in exploiting this
but, understandably did not fully appreciate the radically new
approach that was required. It was, for example, no longer
satisfactory to infer motivation. Under Henry VII the purpose of a
statute has to be assumed from its text; there is no certainty that it
even represents the King’s wishes. Under his son, not only can we
now follow the drafting of the legislation but often much of the
actual debate which lay behind it. And what is true of statutes is
true generally. The statements ‘Alfred the Great decided’ and
‘Henry VIII decided’ are of quite different orders.
How powerful was Henry? Did he determine the course of his reign or were
others, such as his advisors Thomas Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell, more
influential?
For the hugely influential Geoffrey Elton, Henry was a negative, ‘far from masterful, competent or in
charge’. The result was a vacuum filled by others. Jack Scarisbrick saw Henry as more of a force but
essentially selfish: ‘Rarely, if ever, have the unawareness and irresponsibility of a king proved more
costly to the material benefit of his people’. To L.B. Smith, Henry was the universal spider. David
Starkey, has advanced the opposite view, ‘Henry the vulnerable’, with ‘the essential features of his
rule [being] determined by other intelligences and shaped for other purposes’. The conclusions differ,
but for all of them the character of Henry is central. It is a view which would have been passionately
endorsed by the King’s contemporaries.
What, then, should readers of History Today make of Henry? There are two indisputables. First,
Henry was personally dominant in both court and government. As James Gairdner put it,
Strictly speaking Henry was not an unconstitutional sovereign; all his doings were clothed with
legality. But the whole machinery of the state, both legislative and executive, moved simply in
accordance with his pleasure.
But dominant need not mean domineering. In any power structure where gaining and keeping the
confidence of the head person is crucial to success, individuals are found in ‘sets’ and ‘subsets’ acting
for mutual support and advantage. They are often described as ‘factions’ but the political dimension of
that term can mislead. ‘Sets’ are organic, formed through natural ties of family, friendship, locality,
taste, common concern, ambition and self interest. They vary in how tight or loose they are and they
can overlap. Such patterns of relationship are observable in the courts of Byzantium, or around Hitler
and Stalin or, for that matter around the Vice-Chancellor of a modern university. Henry VIII’s court
was just like that.
How important was Henry’s personality?
The second certainty is that Henry the man and Henry the king cannot be separated. Henry was as
convinced as Louis XIV that ‘l’état c’est moi’ (I am the state). True he did say, when about to marry
Anne of Cleves: ‘If it were not to satisfy the world and my realm, I would not do that I must this day for
none earthly thing’, but ‘satisfy’ meant no more than ‘do what is expected’. He was not marrying for
the sake of the realm but because he couldn’t, with honour, get out of it. Henry’s private character and
private life and his public persona and political life interpenetrated. Pollard’s generation and its
successors covered many pages with evaluations of Henry’s supposed foreign policy. Egoism,
however, provides the simple explanation. Henry’s constant objective was to be recognized as a
monarch of European standing. An exception to this is the 1530s but then only because the object
was to resolve his personal matrimonial problems and then to defend the outcome. Egoism is equally
obvious in domestic matters. Henry responded to the Lincolnshire protesters in the Pilgrimage of
Grace in 1536 with abuse:
How presumptuous then are ye, the rude commons of one shire, and that one of the most brute and
beastly of the whole realm, and of least experience, to find fault with your prince... whom ye are
bound by all laws to obey and serve, with both your lives, lands and goods, and for no worldly cause
to withstand.
His conviction that he possessed superior wisdom and absolute authority was total. It was
unforgivable presumption to challenge him, an impertinence towards the Lord’s anointed which was
conclusive evidence of ‘a cankered heart’.
Egoism was compounded by falsity and deceit. Henry was very much the faux bonhomme; after
Thomas More had been seen walking with the royal arm round his shoulders, he warned that the King
would behead him without a qualm if it ‘could win him a castle in France’. Indeed Edmund de la Pole,
Earl of Suffolk, was beheaded in 1513 precisely to free Henry to invade France. The Earl had been
extradited on promise that his life would be spared, but since that guarantee had been given by his
father, Henry himself felt absolved. He was nothing if not legalistic, provided it suited him
Linked to this was an ability to deny reality, an obstinate conviction that facts were as he wanted to
them to be. At the height of the Pilgrimage of Grace he wrote to the embattled Duke of Norfolk: ‘it is
much to our marvel to receive so many desperate letters from you’. If things were as bad as the Duke
said, he was obviously falling down on the job, unless, that is, he was so concerned about problems
that he was overlooking the good news which must be there. Henry was the world’s best armchair
strategist.
Opinionated self-righteousness made Henry both the most forgiving and the most unforgiving of men.
An alleged offender who could reach the King, abjectly confess himself guilty of whatever Henry
suspected, true or not, and throw himself on royal mercy, could expect to be pardoned. In so doing he
had confirmed Henry’s perspicacity. On the other hand, if the King suspected ‘dissembling’, ‘stiffness’
or ingratitude he would be harsh in the extreme. Pole again:
he has robbed every kind of man, made sport of the nobility, never loved the people, troubled the
clergy, and torn like a wild beast the men who were the greatest honour to his kingdom.
Between 1509 and 1547, more English notables were executed than under any other monarch before
or since.
All these traits fed a failing which the French ambassador Marillac identified in 1540: ‘distrust and
fear’. Henry was insecure. This is where the sets and subsets mattered. If the person at the top is
open to influence they can exert pressure, and Henry was at times very susceptible. Wolsey fell, not
because the King planned his downfall but because Henry was pressured. After the fall of his second
great minister, Thomas Cromwell, Henry grumbled that his counsellors ‘upon light pretexts, by false
accusations, had made him put to death the most faithful servant he ever had’. Herbert of Cherbury
concluded that: ‘Impressions privately given to the king by any court-whisperer were hardly or never
to be effaced’. On the other hand, the qualification ‘susceptible at times’is important. Henry was not a
puppet. His vulnerability does not contradict the proposition that he was truly dominant. His word was
law and he was capable of initiative and decision. The point is that his innate suspiciousness meant
that he could on occasion be persuaded. As the dying Wolsey famously said to Sir William Kingston,
constable of the Tower, ‘Be well advised and assured what matter ye put in [the King’s] head, for ye
shall never pull it out again’. Thomas More, too, said much the same.
What were the key influences on Henry’s personality?
In the search for the real Henry the hardest question is to explain why was he as he was. The
evidence is almost all second-hand; Henry left no diary and only a handful of his more than a
thousand letters are at all personal. Take upbringing. Modern psychology leaves no doubt about the
formative influence of childhood, but there is little evidence for Henry the child and the adolescent.
Was he repressed, as some ambassadors say? How was he affected by the early death of his elder
brother? Was he influenced by his formidable grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort? In the Royal
Collection is a terracotta bust believed to be of the young Henry. What is the relationship between that
laughing happy child and the man he became? What did he really feel about marrying his sister-in-law
Katherine and what weight should we place on the admission in a youthful letter to Erasmus that the
news of her brother’s death had re-opened the wound ‘of the death of his dearest mother’ ‘which time
had brought to insensibility’?
Marillac, who fastened on Henry’s obsessive
suspiciousness, also reported that he was ‘so covetous
that all the riches in the world would not satisfy him’.
Henry was avarice personified. This trait is evident in page
after page of his inventories. That a king should regard a
full treasury as desirable is understandable, but Henry
was obsessed with ownership. When he died he had
thousands of yards of cloth of gold in store, far more than
could ever be needed. Why over a hundred pairs of
embroidered sleeves? Why in the cash-strapped 1540s
did his agents conspire to keep him from hearing about
jewels on the market? And why, having inherited thirteen
houses did he acquire and retain thirty or so more, many
of which he never visited?
Henry would, no doubt, be gratified that his inner
psychology is hard to understand: ‘if my cap knew what I
was thinking, I would burn it’. The only truly private letters
which survive are those to Anne Boleyn. They reveal
genuine passion and a true psychological dependency on
her, something borne out by contemporary comments. But
they cover only two years in a ten year relationship. As for
its collapse, even if we assume that by 1536 Henry’s
feelings for Anne were dead and that she was an obstacle
to his desires, what do we make of a man who as an act of grace summons the executioner from
Calais to behead her in the French manner?
The difficulty in reaching the inner Henry explains the speculation and psycho history which appears
all too often. However there are clues. One thing which obsessed him was status. This is not
surprising; the whole of his upbringing and environment was designed to emphasise regal distance.
Hence the egoism. He alone mattered. Henry, of course, did not see egoism as a fault but as a
response to God. He was God’s anointed in reality, not merely in coronation theory, and it would be a
sin to tolerate any slur on that high calling. This conviction freed him to destroy anyone, however
intimate. Status is the ultimate explanation of the break with Rome. Matrimonial difficulty opened
Henry’s eyes to the fact that human authority was frustrating what God had decreed. As the years
passed, his version of Christianity became increasingly idiosyncratic but the changes he forced on the
English Church are explicable only as an attempt to obey God. As the Whitehall inscription
announced ‘religion has been restored, and with him on the throne the truths of God have begun to be
held in due reverence’.
Yet if possessing a God-given status, why the insecurity? One factor undoubtedly was having no male
heir until he had reached middle age, and the birth of Edward only meant that the focus of anxiety
shifted. But circumstances alone cannot account for the depth of Henry’s vulnerability. Despite his
bluff extrovert performance, he had a deep need to rely on other people. Given ideas, he could
pursue them – the work he put in on the divorce shows that – but he rarely initiated. The radical
solution to his matrimonial dilemma was sold to him in the teeth of traditionalists who advised
otherwise. Moderate religious reform progressed in the 1530s because Anne Boleyn, Thomas
Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell had command of the King’s ear. He was at his least secure when his
deepest convictions were engaged. The succession problem which followed the death of Edward VI
and rumbled on for the rest of the century was because Henry was determined that the crown should
go to his daughters Mary and Elizabeth, but equally determined to maintain that both were illegitimate.
Insecurity is probably the key factor in understanding Henry and sex. Once again historians differ. Did
he, as one of his subjects claimed, ‘want only an apple and a fair wench to dally with’? Was the
assertion that he had never spared a man in his anger or a woman in his lust genuine or locker room
bragging? The latter seems probable for Henry’s extra-marital activity is markedly restrained, in
contrast to, say, Charles V, Francis I or more than one pope. Couple the good evidence that in the
1530s Henry suffered episodes of impotence with remarks he made which show that he identified
virility with producing children, especially a son, and the obvious conclusion is that the sexual
disfunction of his mature years was caused by anxiety. When this began it is hard to say. Katherine of
Aragon’s record of six conceptions in fifteen years is not good and all but one of them ended in
miscarriage or neo-natal death. It would have been only human to wonder what was wrong. In the
1520s Henry rationalized it as a consequence of his unwitting disobedience to God in marrying his
brother’s widow and a similar anxiety surfaced in the last months of his marriage to Anne Boleyn.
Viagra, of course, had not been invented.
What did contemporaries (people around at the time) think of Henry?
Asking the real Henry to stand up reveals to twenty-first-century eyes a figure both monstrous and
inadequate, but the perspective and values of Henry’s contemporaries were markedly different. What
first impressed them was his magnificence, the essential virtue expected of a king. They would have
found nothing to query in a superfluity of embroidered sleeves. At the sight of Henry in full Garter
robes, the Venetian diplomat, Pasquaglio, declared: ‘he is handsomest potentate I ever set eyes on’.
Henry was a big man with big ideas. His summit meeting with Francis I at the Field of Cloth of Gold
was one of the marvels of Europe. It was regal glory in action. Henry was the greatest builder of all
the English kings. Hampton Court alone was enlarged three times; Whitehall was essentially his
creation, so was St James. With only limited modifications, his palaces lasted English monarchs for
two hundred years. Their walls were bright with over three hundred tapestries. The gold, silver gilt and
silver plate was prodigious; he possessed over a hundred ornate salts, while his gold and silver
candlesticks alone together weighed a quarter of a ton. To the sixteenth-century mind, magnificence
was, not egregious waste: it was of the essence of monarchy.
A similar contrast applies to Henry’s foreign policy. We may dismiss it as egoistical posing, and his
military successes as trivial and bought at wholly unreasonable expense. Some of his subjects felt the
same, but by no means all. Henry VIII was the first king for more than a century to conquer territory in
France. In the last four years of his reign the English laity contributed £750,000 towards war with no
hint of rebellion. When Parliament voted the taxes for 1545 it declared that:
We the people of this his realm have for the most part of us so lived under his Majesty’s sure
protection and do yet so live out of all fear and danger as if there were no war at all, even as the small
fishes of the sea, in most stormy and tempestuous weather, do lie quietly under the rock or bank side,
and are not moved with the surges of the water, nor stirred out of their quiet place, howsoever the
wind bloweth.
The early Elizabethan Ballad of Flodden Field, begins its peroration with the lines:
This noble King Henry won great victories in France
Through the might that Christ Jesus did him send
lists the towns he conquered, and ends with the brag that he ‘kept to Calais, ‘plenished with
Englishmen until the death that he did die’. For the bulk of the nation ‘Henry had to do what a king had
to do’.
It may, of course, seem that this was not true for Henry VIII’s religious policies. Current revisionist
historians have gone to great lengths to show that the traditional Church was deeply rooted in English
society and that change was not wanted. But Henry met active opposition only in the North in 1536.
and nobles who were deeply traditional in religion, were active in suppressing it. As for the more
populous parts, they would threaten revolt over taxes but not over Henry’s religious spoliation.
Spectators might be shocked at the martyrdom of priests but not sufficiently moved to try to save the
martyrs. When six years after Henry’s death the country had the opportunity to reverse the ruin of the
Church, it did not put its hands in its pocket. The late medieval Church was more vigorous than was
once thought, but support for it was clearly too superficial to cause Henry concern.
The third quality that dazzled contemporaries was personality. In the desperate crisis of the summer
of 1549, Henry’s erstwhile secretary implored Protector Somerset to act on behalf of the young King
Edward:
Sir, for a king, do like a king. Go no further than to him who died last of noble memory, Henry VIII.
Kept he not his subjects from highest to lowest in due obedience? And how? By the only maintenance
of justice in due course.
Mary I faced with male counsellors ready to treat her orders as an invitation to debate, burst out on
one occasion that ‘she only wished her father might come to life for a month’. Early in James I’s reign,
the theatrical company ‘Prince Henry’s Men’ had a huge success at the Fortune Theatre with a play
with the significant title When you see me you know me. Indeed, so successful were they that His
Majesty’s Players, their rivals at the Globe, had to get Shakespeare and John Fletcher to write Henry
VIII. Each play assumes that Henry’s personal foibles and mannerisms would be immediately
recognized by a London audience despite the years since the King’s death. Henry was remembered
as a proper king.
There is a chasm between the ways historians see Henry VIII and the way his subjects saw him. But it
would be wrong to reject the latter because today we are so much better informed. Both
characterizations have to be held in tension. Fallible though Henry was, modem criticism cannot
destroy the reality that to his people he was a great king. A ballad written soon after his death
summed him up in these words.
For if wisdom or manhood by any means could
Have saved a man’s life to ensure for ever,
The King Henry the 8th so noble and so bold
Out of this wide world he would have passed never.
Not even Henry could manage that, but it is no little achievement that 450 years after his death it
remains true that ‘When you see me, you know me’.